For twenty years, if you rolled out of the Wilkins Street parking lot in Hudson and pointed your bike south, you knew exactly what you were getting: 5.1 miles of paved trail to Marlborough, then the same 5.1 miles back. That was the Assabet River Rail Trail, finished in 2005, and it was a fine ride. It was also, for anyone starting from the Hudson end, a dead end in the other direction. North of Wilkins Street there was nothing but an unbuilt railbed and a gap that had sat unfinished since the Boston and Maine Railroad stopped running trains through here in 1980.
That gap is closed now. A new 7.6-mile paved segment, built by the state's Department of Conservation and Recreation in partnership with Eversource, opened this year and runs from Hudson's Wilkins Street lot east to South Sudbury. Locals who've been tracking the project call it "SudHud," short for Sudbury-to-Hudson, and it changes what a bike ride out of downtown Hudson actually means.
What Got Built, and Why It Took So Long
The delay had nothing to do with paving and everything to do with what runs underneath the trail. Eversource needed to bury a high-voltage transmission line along this exact corridor, and the state decided to build the recreational path directly on top of the utility's finished sub-base rather than run two separate projects through the same wetlands. Eversource's construction started in late 2022 and wrapped in November 2024. DCR then moved in for the trail-specific work: paving, three rebuilt bridges, a new precast arch tunnel under Chestnut Street in Hudson, and the removal of 3.5 acres of invasive plants replaced with more than 2,000 native trees and shrubs. Crews finished the asphalt in the fall of 2025, and the segment opened to the public this year.
The corridor itself has history worth noting. This was the Central Massachusetts Branch of the Boston and Maine Railroad, and before that a Fitchburg Railroad line that first reached Hudson in 1850. Passenger service to Hudson ended in 1939. Freight held on until 1980. For most of the four decades since, this stretch was just an overgrown right-of-way the state leased from the MBTA and never got around to building.
The Diamond That Actually Changes the Math
The new segment's east end lands at South Sudbury, at a spot the trail community calls the Sudbury Diamond. This is where the old Central Mass line once crossed the New Haven Railroad's Old Colony line at a right angle, and DCR preserved that historic track crossing inside a new roundabout at the trailhead. The reason it matters for a Hudson rider is what the Diamond connects to: the Bruce Freeman Rail Trail, a 20-mile paved path running north through Concord, Acton, Carlisle, and Westford before touching Lowell.
Before this year, the only way to link Hudson's trail system to Bruce Freeman was by road. Now it's a single connected surface, and the numbers shift accordingly.
| Route | Distance | Available since |
|---|---|---|
| Hudson to Marlborough, one-way (original Assabet River Rail Trail) | 5.1 miles | 2005 |
| Hudson to South Sudbury, out-and-back on the new segment | 15.6 miles | 2026 |
| Full loop: Hudson, new SudHud segment, Bruce Freeman, back via Assabet River Rail Trail | 19.8 miles | 2026 |
Riding out of the same Wilkins Street lot Hudson cyclists have used for two decades, you can now put together a route nearly double the length of what the entire original trail offered, without a single stretch on a road shoulder.
What You Actually Pass Along the Way
Leaving the Wilkins Street trailhead heading east, the new segment first runs past Charter Oak Country Club before crossing the reconstructed Fort Meadow Brook bridge, officially Bridge 130, and ducking under Chestnut Street through the new tunnel. This part of the ride sits entirely within Hudson, on ground that was fenced construction site as recently as 2024.
Past the Hudson-Sudbury-Marlborough town line, the trail runs through the Assabet River National Wildlife Refuge, 2,200 acres of freshwater wetland and oak-pine forest managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The land has an odd history for a nature preserve: during World War II it operated as the Fort Devens-Sudbury Annex, storing and testing munitions shipped in by rail. It wasn't transferred to Fish and Wildlife until 2000.
At the Dutton Road crossing, about a mile from the Sudbury Diamond, the trail passes the site of the old Wayside Inn Railroad Waiting Room, the train stop for the historic Wayside Inn two miles south. Babe Ruth, who lived nearby, is documented as having caught trains to Boston from this exact spot. A little farther along, at mile 1.9 heading from Sudbury, an original granite mile marker still reads B21/N83, marking the distance in miles from Boston's North Station and from Northampton on the old Mass Central line. Near the Diamond itself, an 1890 Section House still stands, one of the only surviving structures of its kind in Massachusetts, built to house the crews who maintained this stretch of track.
None of this required new construction. It was always here, buried in brush along an unused railbed. The new pavement just made it reachable again.
The Landmarks That Haven't Moved
Everything Hudson riders already know about the Assabet River Rail Trail is still exactly where it was. The restored 1921 Boston and Maine blue caboose still sits alongside the trail as it enters Hudson's commercial district. The trestle 40 feet above the Assabet River is still the best view on the original 5.1-mile stretch. The Main Street Landing boat launch still puts kayaks and canoes on the river a short walk from downtown. What's changed isn't the Hudson end of the trail. It's that the Hudson end is no longer the end.
Where to Stop When You Get Back
The new segment's western terminus at Wilkins Street sits close enough to downtown Hudson that a round trip to South Sudbury and back leaves you a few blocks from a full Main Street dinner without moving the car. Rail Trail Flatbread Co. built its name on wood-fired pizza and a menu that assumes you just got off a bike. Medusa Brewing Company runs a taproom big enough for a group that split up over 15 miles of trail and regrouped for beer. New City Microcreamery does liquid-nitrogen ice cream if the ride ran long and dinner can wait. Café 641 covers the morning version of the same trip, for anyone starting the ride with coffee instead of ending it with a pint.
What Still Isn't Finished
The connection that matters for a fall bike ride is done, but the larger vision behind it isn't. West of downtown Hudson, a 1.6-mile stretch toward the Berlin town line remains unimproved and is still in the design phase, with the town having received grant funding in 2023 and 2025 to move that work forward. Farther east, the gap between Sudbury and Wayland, roughly 1.5 miles through the Great Meadows Wildlife Refuge, isn't expected to open before 2027. The full Mass Central Rail Trail, once complete, will run 104 miles from Boston to Northampton. What opened this year in Hudson is one finished piece of that, not the whole thing.
For a rider who just wants a longer Saturday morning loop out of Hudson, though, the piece that opened is the piece that counts. The trail doesn't dead-end at Wilkins Street anymore, and after twenty years of it doing exactly that, that's the whole story.
If you're the kind of rider who's started paying closer attention to what's changing along this corridor, from trail investment to the businesses filling in around it, Northeast Realty + Co. tracks those shifts across Hudson and the rest of MetroWest before they show up on the open market. The Insiders Club is where that gets shared first.